Summer 2002 Research Report Marcelo Pellegrini Department of Spanish and Portuguese "Poetry and Essay in Latin America: Two Genres, One Way"

 

I applied to the Tinker travel Grant in order to do Field Research that would help me to write the first chapter of my Doctoral Dissertation. That chapter deals with Gabriela Mistral’s poetry and prose, and the relationship of her writing with the avant-garde movement in Latin America. That topic, as many other aspects of Mistral’s work, has not been well explored by the critics, and I believe it is a crucial part of the development of her literary life. Many of the most difficult aspects of Mistral’s career could be explained if we seriously explore that relationship. Mistral has been considered by most of the critics as an “old fashioned” writer, since her first poetry collection, Desolación, was published in 1922, the year in which another important poetry book, Trilce, by César Vallejo, was published in Latin America. Vallejo’s collection has been considered as a Latin American avant-garde milestone, one of those that mark the beginning of a new artistic era. The fact that a writer like Mistral, who was always loyal to the traditional poetic forms of the Spanish Language, started out the same year, has been a very striking thing for many scholars. But if we think about Mistral’s prose, we would have a very different case. Mistral’s essays are very much concerned with the art of her time, and show us a literary personality that was extremely aware of what was going on with her contemporaries. I do not want to imply that Mistral’s poetry is indeed Old-fashioned; it just belongs to another “attitude” or tradition, which is the one that keeps the poetic form as a main concern when it comes to the writing process.

Poetry and Prose feature different uses of language, and the difference between both genres are crucial to the understanding of a writer like Mistral. The question that I would like to answer in my dissertation is the following: For what reason a poet, when it comes to explaining an idea, would choose to express his or herself in prose? I think the answer should lead us to think about the nature of poetry and the nature of prose. It is a matter of “effect” upon the reader, and it is also a matter of the very unique functions of language. Gabriela Mistral is a writer that wanted to construct a certain kind of consciousness in her essays and let a wide range of readers knows about it. The essays that she wrote about the avan-garde and about the writers of her time give us a great deal of valuable information about the construction of her literary consciousness.

The National Library of Santiago de Chile has a very important archive that contains a lot of Mistral’s unpublished material, most of it in the essay-like prose. Those texts could put some light on the topic of my dissertation, since a lot of them deal with Mistral’s contemporaries. The task, then, was to consult the Archive in the Library itself. So, between May 20th and June 18th, 2002, I traveled to Santiago, Chile, to conduct my Field Research at the National Library. Most of the Archive consists in Microfilms of unpublished material (about 70 rolls) that should be read with special devices and microfilm machines.

Upon arrival, I talked with Mr. Pedro Pablo Zegers, the Director of the Special Collection Department at the National Library, and Chief of the library’s “Writer’s Archive”, who kindly let me consult all the material I wanted. Being one of the foremost specialists in Mistral’s work in the country, Mr. Zegers knows very well all the related material that the library has, and prepared a book compilation of all of Mistral’s unpublished articles and reviews; the book contains only the material that was written by the poet until 1922, the year she left Chile. It went out only a week before my arrival. This publication will be extremely helpful in my research, and will be a very important source for those who are interested in that aspect of Mistral’s work.

I looked at all of the Microfilm rolls available, and found out that one of them contains an unpublished Mistral’s talk on Alfonso Reyes, a Mexican poet and essayist, and one of the writers she admired the most. It is a very long piece of writing that shows us the high consideration Mistral had for Reyes. That consideration also deals with the opinions she had about the literary life of Mexico (a place in which she spent an important part of her life) and the importance of Alfonso Reyes as a man of letters. I decided to purchase a copy of the Microfilm, which was made by the people at the Microfilm Lab at the National Library. All the information contained there will help me to write the first chapter of my dissertation, a task in which I’m already engaged.

Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to interview the poet Jaime Quezada (as I mentioned it in my proposal) since he was out of the country during the whole month I was there. I also realized immediately that the Gabriela Mistral Foundation does not have any kind of archive like the one in the National Library, so I did not go there as I planned. That Foundation is a very new institution, and it is only in charge of cultural activities that celebrate Gabriela Mistral and her life.